Archival Artifacts from the History of Economics

Month: June 2017

Evsey Domar was hired at Johns Hopkins in 1948. This posting provides a convenient list of the greatest (English language) hits in the macroeconomics of fiscal policy at mid-twentieth century. ___________________________________ Course Announcement Fiscal Policy 627-628. Associate Professor Domar. Two hours weekly through the year. Fiscal policy as an instrument of

This posting provides information for four Harvard economics Ph.D. candidates: their respective academic backgrounds, the six subjects of their general examinations along with the names of the examiners, the subject of their special subject, thesis subject and advisor(s) (where available). ________________________________________ DIVISION OF HISTORY AND POLITICAL SCIENCE EXAMINATIONS FOR THE DEGREE OF PH.D.

When Friedrich Hayek came to the University of Chicago in 1950, he organized a faculty seminar to run for two consecutive quarters on the subject “Equality and Justice”. A draft of his letter announcing the seminar as well as its schedule and suggested bibliography are transcribed below. I have added in brackets any handwritten additions

In a previous posting Economics in the Rear-view Mirror provided a except from the Faculty Minutes of Columbia University’s Faculty of Political Science agreeing to the modification of the second foreign language requirement in its Ph.D. program to allow mathematics to count for that second foreign language. Below we have the full proposal

The following course outline with reading assignments comes from one of the two year-long courses William J. Ashley taught at Harvard for nearly a decade around the turn of the 20th century. No copy of his reading list for Medieval Economic History of Europe is found in the Harvard Archive’s collections of course reading

The collection of artifacts here at Economics in the Rear-view Mirror has grown sufficiently large that part of my self-imposed curation duties now include adding postings to link back to some earlier postings that perhaps newer visitors and subscribers have yet to discover. Today I add the list of reading assignments extracted from Frank W. Fetter’s

Frank W. Taussig taught a two term economic theory course offered for both graduates and undergraduates at Harvard for nearly the entire first third of the twentieth century. Some years he taught one term and a colleague would teach the other term, but usually it was his core course in the curriculum. Today’s posting

John Henry Williams was professor of economics at Harvard (1921-57) and served from 1936-48 as the first dean of its Graduate School of Public Administration. Together with Alvin H. Hansen he taught a graduate course with the nominal title “Principles of Money and Banking” that from judging from detailed notes taken in 1938-39

Henry Simons’ course “Economics of Fiscal Policy” was introduced into the Chicago public finance offerings in the Winter Quarter of 1934-35 and was taught by him in all but two years before his suicide that happened immediately after the Spring Quarter of 1946 had concluded. From Norman M. Kaplan’s student notes for Simon’s

This 1951 draft of the regulations governing the award of A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Harvard was submitted by Arthur Smithies to his colleagues. There were few changes when compared to the 1947 regulations, the reduction of field examinations from six to five appears indeed to have been the most significant change. With